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Monday, August 31, 2015

Three things I learned about the welfare of dogs

Most people percieved the welfare of their own dog as better than the average companion dog, according to research by Mia Cobb.

What do you know about the welfare of dogs? The more I
read about animal welfare, the more I realise I don’t know. Concerningly, our
perceptions about animal welfare can be way off the mark when it comes to the
experience of animals. Fortunately science can help.

The Working Dog Alliance was born from the AAWS ashes,
and exists to improve the welfare and performance of working dogs in Australia.

But here’s the take-home message: if we are to improve
the welfare of dogs in our lives, we need to consider the task, the situation
and/or the environment from their perspective.

Applying lessons from the natural behaviour of wolves won't necessarily allow us to improve the welfare of domestic dogs like Phil the Maltese.

Here are three things I learned from Mia’s fantastic
talk.

There’s no consensus regarding the definition of animal
welfare. Historically, it was thought to be access to resources needed to
survival and ability to reproduce. But you can have all those things and still
have poor welfare (for example, a factory farmed chicken or a dog left alone
for 12 hours a day without any stimulation). We can compare the existence of a
captive species to its existence in the wild. This can be helpful if we’re
assessing the welfare of a captive animal in a zoo, in ensuring that an enclosure
replicates natural conditions and facilities natural behaviours. But it’s
harder with domestic animals: how do you apply data about wolf behaviour to the
life of my 2kg, toothless rescue dog Phil? Mia’s definition of welfare is “the
state of an individual animal, which can range from negative to positive, and
is influenced by physical, behavioural, environmental and affective
experiences.”

Our perceptions and attitudes have a real impact on the
way we care for and treat animals, and thus on animal welfare. But our
perceptions and attitudes are influenced heavily by a number of factors. One is
social license – whether our community approves of a particular practice, such
as the use of lions and elephants in circuses. This has lost its social license
in Australia and is thus now quite uncommon, and usually causes a protest when it does occur. There’s also subjective norms –
whether we think the people who are important to us would approve or disapprove
of a behaviour in question. So your vet, whose opinion
you pay for, may recommend desexing your dog and discuss the benefits and
risks. But your best friend or mum may discredit this view, and their view may
carry more weight even if less informed, because what they think is ultimately more important to you. And then there’s the discomfort of
cognitive dissonance – we don’t like to acknowledge that something we’ve been
doing for a while is no longer appropriate or in fact never was – even in the
light of compelling new information – so we may simply find reasons to justify
that behaviour. For example, tail docking was banned in Australia in light of
overwhelming evidence that this was not in the interests of animals – leading to
pain and reducing dogs’ ability to communicate with other dogs. Yet many people
simply argued harder that this was necessary “because changing their behaviour
would require an acknowledgement that they have previously been engaging in
behaviour that was not ideal.”

There is no single, magic test for animal welfare.
Welfare assessment needs to take into account an animal’s behaviour (activity
budgets, preferences, aversions, stereotypies and other abnormal behaviour) as
well as physiology (weight, immune parameters, nutrition, exercise,
reproductive parameters) and the human element (how do human interactions
impact animal behaviour and physiology). Science is not flawless, and new
information comes to light all of the time, but as long as we are aware of
these limitations we can use it as a tool. Importantly, welfare interventions such as enrichment
programs impact different dogs differently. In Mia’s own research on guide
dogs, she found that an enrichment program had some value to some dogs, but not
universal value to all dogs.

Just as human psychology has progressed from studying
malfunction and disorder to emphasising positive psychology, or the conditions
which enable human beings to thrive or flourish, Mia predicts that the emphasis of animal welfare
science has moved from being largely negative (animals need freedom from pain)
to positive (animals need x and y to flourish) and will continue to shift in this direction. Watch this space.

PS. Re considering welfare from an animal's point of view, you might be interested in this upcoming workshop from VetPrac. According to Ilana Mendels, from VetPrac, in a veterinary clinical context the benefits of managing the worry and welfare of our patients include smoother management of treatments, anaesthetics and procedures and less injury to vets.

3 comments:

RE: natural & wild comparisons for welfare. Lying on a couch is not something a wolf does but a dog may enjoy it. Playing with a tennis ball is not something a wolf does but a dog may enjoy it. Learning to roll over is not something a wolf does but a dog may enjoy it. Playing chasey with a person is not something a wolf does but a dog may enjoy it. Lying in front of an open fire on a winters day or an air conditioner on a hot summer day is not something a wolf does but a dog may enjoy it...

The odds of having a productive dog training career are low if you decide to just read a book or two on the subject and set up shop. This type of surface level preparation for your dog training career may leave you ill equipped to deal with the business aspects and typical obstacles. See more http://dogsaholic.com/training/teach-a-dog-to-roll-over.html

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